Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Wednesday December 19, 2007 @04:09PM
from the horror-stories-from-the-front dept.

suntory writes "I am a lecturer at a Spanish university. This week had to attend a workshop on 'Advanced HTML and CSS' for the university staff. Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like — the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects. Of course, the workshop turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of time. So I was wondering what other similar experiences you have had, and what was your worst IT workshop?"

Oh, it was around. It was back rub for a while and Google.stanford.edu for a while. The google.com domain was registered in 1997 or so and it was moved there.

I actually remember hitting the Google.stanford.edu implementation a few times. My ISP had a BBS that I used to connect with because I didn't have the Internet connection kit yet. That's what they called the early web browsers. They packaged the browser and some Compuserve 3 month trial thing and called it a kit. (windows still didn't have one stock at that time) The big search thing back then was aggregates like BigFoot where they presented you with what you wanted instead of doing a web search.

Those where the days when the E-commerce buz meant a business having a single page web presence and a few email addresses they had to check on dial up. It was more like a page in the phone book but without a fancy way of finding entries. But that was when outlook did the mailbox thing and you could basically use it as a fetchmail server and an interoffice messaging system without needing exchange.

Thanks for making me feel like I've wasted 1/3rd of my years reading slashdot.

Sad, but I do remember when I finally registered here (after months of lurking, I'd say), I felt like my UID was _really_ late compared to a lot of the 4-digits that were posting.

Wonder where they all went. Can't be jobs (have always had one). Can't be wives (been with the same gal for 12 years off and on). Can't be families (watch my mentally retarded BiL 4 days a week). Can't be sports (geeks don't play them). WoW maybe?

Seriously, do you sub 10K ids have an IRC channel where they announce when and where an id war is going on? It's like someone starts a thread on ids and you guys have responded before the poster has even hit submit! I think everyone under 10K has a Chuck Norris complex or som(*&@*^... *Connection Reset By Peer*

There are two possible explanations:(1) Most low-uid people have become lurkers. They read a lot but post little. I know this applies to me.(2) Nobody really looks at the uid of posters until a uid-war starts, so nobody notices the low-uid people unless there is a uid-war.I suspect it's actually a combination of the two.

What have I done since I joined slashdot? Changed universities, changed a few jobs, changed a few girlfriends, changed a few psychiatrists, and also changed a few passwords.:-P

Ranger: "Holy macaroni! I can't believe I'm seeing a 3-digit UID. He's in focus! Oh, I've waited my entire life for this moment!" *takes out gun*
Bender: "What are you doing with that?"
Lrrr: "You're going to kill this innocent Slashdotter?"
Ranger: "Of course not! I'm just gonna tranquilize him so I can chop off his feet as proof he exists. Then dump him back in the wild. He'll do fine!"

I know your pain. The email address on my account is fubared because the company it was attached to went out of business with no warning. It's not quite a classic catch-22. I can't change the email address without having access to the email address, but the mail server no longer exists so no one has access to the email address so no one can change it.

I was taking a University course on C++ and data structures. Big class, maybe 150 people in a theatre-like room. At the front of the room was a PC, connected to a projector so we could see screen. This was a Solaris system. The prof had emailed the lecture slides to himself.

So to get the slides, he opens a terminal, and types pine. A big list of all his email fills the screen. He starts looking for his lecture notes... at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.

At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.

at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.

At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.

I took the advanced C++ class at my university the first quarter after they made the class transition from Pascal. I had prior work experience as a C++ programmer, so I figured it would be an easy A. Boy, was I wrong!

The professor was like 80 years old. He must have been around before they developed the one in binary and only had zeros. That in itself isn't so bad, except that he didn't bother to even crack the book to teach C++. He'd give examples and try to work problems on the whiteboard in some kind of pseudo language that wasn't Pascal, definitely wasn't C++, and that hopelessly confused the students who didn't have a really good grasp of the language. Oh, it gets better, though.

His TA, the girl who graded our labs, knew even less. We had a lab where we had to implement a complex number class, ho hum. The instructions stated that we had to develop methods to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. complex numbers, but they didn't explicitly state what we had to call our functions.

Any C++ programmer worth anything would know that the obvious thing to do is to overload the +, -, *, and / operators so that they could accept complex number arguments and return the appropriate result. I spent a few hours working on it, churned out my class, and when I got the lab back, she had failed me!

I asked why she gave me an F, and she explained that I was supposed to implement the functions using names like add, subtract, etc. I told her that that was nowhere in the instructions for the lab, and she admitted that it was okay to use other function names, but operator overloading was a no-no. Of course, I asked why, and her answer—I kid you not—was that because if you overloaded the operators, other programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your class and built-in types. I argued vehemently that that was the point of operator overloading, that it was an extremely common practice in C++, but she wouldn't be convinced.

It was toward the end of the semester, so I took the lab to my professor and explained to him what was going on. I even took a C++ best practices book with me to show what I was talking about and to prove that I'm not some crackpot stupid student trying to eek out a few extra points. The professor proceeded to explain to me that the university had just informed him that they were letting him go after the semester, that they were firing him. (His words exactly, not mine.) He said that if I had a problem with my grade, I needed to take it up with the TA, because he wasn't going to override anything she said.

In all the programming classes I took at the university, that was the only one in which I got a B, and I was absolutely furious. Not so much because of the negligible impact to my GPA, but because it's the only time I've ever gotten a grade that I truly felt like I didn't deserve, and it was all because of an idiot professor who didn't give a damn about anything (gee, I wonder why they fired him) and a TA who didn't know crap about the subject that she was grading us on.

It's too bad, too. All of my other experiences at the university were relatively pleasant, and I'm a life member of the alumni association today. But that one incident still sticks in my mind as the height of stupidity. I wish now that I had had the balls to escalate it to the dean or maybe even higher. I can't help but wonder how many students failed or otherwise did miserably in that class because of him, and I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience. God, I hope not.

The bit of TA/instructor irrationality that I had to face came from an intro EE class, building basic logic circuits. The lab bits were based around groups and early in the class I grouped with a few other guys who seemed to know what they were doing. The TA came up and said we couldn't have a group of 4, it had to be a group of 3, so I was forced into a group with 2 other castoffs.

Yeah, similar thing happened to me. I had a database luddite for a lecturer and he failed me for using temporary views to solve a certain problem as he'd rather I did subselects, even though my SQL was simpler to read, and scaled a lot better for huge datasets.

As this was part of the final project, of course I failed the subject...

The Ironic part was, my solution turned out to be be THE ONLY way to do some complex data mining in MySQL 3.something for my first IT job. Imagine the lulz that were had by my boss when he found out that the solution that got the CFO off his back was also responsible for me failing databases 1001...

My intro CS "professor" was absolute crap. I was a freshman with no programming experience beyond BASIC when I was 10 years old. I routinely had to correct him, nearly daily in fact. Not because I wanted to be a smartass, but because I could see the puzzled looks of my classmates as he contradicted himself constantly.

At first, I thought it was just a language barrier (he was Indian), but as I grew more skilled in the subject I realized he was just talking out his ass all the time. This led my and some fellow students to do some detective work on his credentials... where did he get his degree? We eventually figured out he was a big fat liar!

He claimed to have taught at various universities (I remember Georgia Tech off the top of my head). None of them had heard of him. His Ph.D. turned out to be a mail-in degree from an online school. That was, thankfully, his last semester. Unfortunately, I fear he just got a job somewhere else doing the same thing.

Hint: He's the "K" in "AWK". He helped Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invent UNIX at Bell Labs. He co-authored "The C Programming Language", the very first book on programming in C, and widely considered by most to be the bible of modern programming.

He was extremely fun and engaging, and I felt honored to be in the presence of one of the forefathers of modern computing.

I always wonder why so much traffic on SlashDot ( or web based public interfaces like this ) can be so confrontational. That was never my intention. I guess, yes, I defend the Notes development process after it got past version 3.x. Internally the first decent Notes was 2.15a and it still used a flat namespace. With Notes 2.15a a person could click on a link on a document and the client would go retrieve the linked to document from some other server and some other database if needed. That was pretty cool when NCSA Mosiac was just getting into the hands of people and Netscape did not yet exist. People could develop applications in a flash, with basic fields and then just drop it on a server and it worked. Debugging was sometimes horrible. Development of more complex applications required some real tricky knowledge at times. Version 3.0c ( a stack of floppies that I still have somewhere ) was a pretty decent revision and I made a ton of money with it. Version 4 was even better with the scripting ability.

I was at camp Microsoft in 1997 meeting with the Exchange team as well as the early Microsoft Transaction server teams and I am happy to say that I got to meet some really brilliant people. Truely gifted software engineers and developers that impressed me completely. My host was Jeff Raikes and he made sure that the Lotus Notes team people were very well taken care of at a five star golf resort. It was pretty cool to meet a real software billionaire that got up every morning to go to work for another billionaire. He asked for input and he got it, straight from people that lived and breated Notes for years. I was one of those people that had to guts to tell him that Exchange was crippled in many ways despite the lavish hotel. I ended up with a few Microsoft people sitting with me on the plane and we all worked over a business issue and they went off to code it all up in Exchange. I did it in Notes in two days flat.

So, to make a long story short, I defend the Notes process because it works very well. Today and yesterday going back years. I think that IBM has dumped their business units that can not longer show profit ( like PCs anymore ) and they are sticking with technologies that have real serious value longterm. I see Lotus is still in there and Notes just keeps on going and going. I stand by my words that in the event of a complete atomic meltdown there will be cockroaches, UNIX, Lotus Notes and Cher. Not necessarily in that order

I'm sorry, but I think you were saying that Exchange was potential competition way back then. It wasn't. Still isn't. In my opinion.

Then once I got there it was a week of "If you encrypt your traffic," (thusly losing the ability to QoS that traffic), "you only need to firewall your management boxes and vlan off all of your VoIP endpoints!" Cue the rest of the class firewalling off their management boxes from everyone else (including themselves) *sigh*

I was a Perl programmer (a proper one, not a CGI.pm monkey.) We got a new CTO. He liked Java. He sent us all on Java courses which, the instructor told us, were a waste of time as (a) we were all expected to be up to speed with the basics, which few of us were, and (b) because he'd been told to cover two weeks' worth of material in two days. I quit after lunch on the first day.

with another member of the IT staff from the college I worked at, back in the early PC days. Think it was the fall of 89. It was a half day thing on a Saturday for PC maintenance. In those days power supply to the motherboard was tricky, my co-host found out the hard way when she hooked one up backwards and it kinda went boom when she powered it up.

That was not quite as spectacular as the time a prof at the college hooked up two PC's via serial cables, one of them being on an AV cart (and plugged into it) - seems the cart was wired wrong, when he fired those up there was an small explosion, a fair bit of smoke and some actual pieces of the serial card from one of the pc's strewn about the case.

Ah, the good old days - I worked on Tandy machines that had fully exposed power supplies, took one apart once (the PC not the power supply!) and wondered what the whirring sound was, thing was still running;)

Oh that I could go back to the day of swapping floppy disks to run stuff.

we had a guy once that SOME HOW managed to shove a P8 connector into a wd hard drive with out realizing it, turned it on and went to the bathroom while it booted.. all i remember was sitting at the register checking someone out and seeing smoke coming from behind the tech bench.. walked over and the damn thing had caught on fire.... thank god they fired him a few years later...................

I took an HTML class online where the "textbook" was of questionable quality. My instructor had posted much better examples on his website. Since I already had experience with HTML, I was able to ignore the class until the very end of the semester. It took six hours to complete all the assignments that I emailed 15 minutes before the deadline. Got a solid "A" even though the textbook was solid "F".

many university lecturers get sent free books and gifts by publishers, the publishers hope that the lecturer will use it as the basis of their course, in theory if the lecturer has good ethics s/he will choose the best book for the job. However, they might curry favour with a particular publisher to get their own book into print, or might use a book written by a friend as a favour.

When I was at university (too many years ago) some lecturers pushed very hard to get you to buy their book, making it clear t

allegedly copied those lectures from the lectures given by our academic research network (I was told that by a fellow student who took the course given by said network)

once actually explained we could use <div> tags as line breaks

teaches all kinds of utterly wrong stuff, including advising us to encode our work in Windows-1250 instead of UTF.

However, two years ago I took a course given by a guy who told a friend of mine "Stop surfing the internet! Or else you won't know how to use Internet Explorer!" (yeah, it loses a bit in translation).
He could spend two hours explaining how to navigate to a bloody webpage from IE 6. And then how to add a crappy link to whatever IE calls bookmarks.
And when I said "could", I mean "did".
Repeatedly.

Since the difference between intelligence and stupidity is that there's a limit on intelligence, let's try naming the *best* conferences we've been to.

I've been to OOPSLA a couple of times. Very enjoyable and informative. More recently, I just attended a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conferences in Atlanta. Lots of good information, especially on Groovy and Grails.

We were getting trained on some desktop sharing / presentation software. The instructor was getting increasingly frustrated with one woman who couldn't seem to manage even the most basic steps. ("Click on the icon. No, the picture thing! Click with your mouse -- no!) Finally she gave that woman control of her own computer...

**Whoosh**! The woman instantly tears into the instructor's hard drive like in one of those hacker movies and starts moving and deleting files! The instructor dived for her own laptop and yanked the Ethernet cable. I'm still not all sure what really happened there.

Effectively passing knowledge on to students in a way that results in them actually learning something is nontrivial.

And no one should know that better than programmers. I quote Douglas Adams:

"There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble," said Richard, "but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil."

Reg looked at him quizzically.

"I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply," he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting."

"I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"

"It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."

Seen plenty of long-lived deadwood in the non-academic world too.I've always taken the meaning of that phrase to be that people who "can" get paid a lot more for "doing" than they would for teaching. So, rather than a barrier of entry, it is an incentive not to teach.

However I DID have an IT guy tell me with a straight face that windows out of the box is more secure than any given Linux install out of the box. He backed down pretty quick when I suggested that we install both OSes on a machine connected to the open Internet, though...

However I DID have an IT guy tell me with a straight face that windows out of the box is more secure than any given Linux install out of the box. He backed down pretty quick when I suggested that we install both OSes on a machine connected to the open Internet, though...

What year was this? A few years ago, some linux distros had some pretty dumb default ports open. Likewise, Microsoft at least showed some sense in enabling the XP SP2 'firewall' by default. Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but a few y

While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such? I stopped using plain HTML at least four years ago, when I discovered Content Management Systems (WebGUI back then, now using Joomla). I've built or helped build dozens of sites, all part time, using CMS, and most of my clients couldn't be happier. They have access to add content all day long, and don't have to worry about "design".

If I went to a Web seminar like the one described in the story, and it didn't mention building sites on top of a CMS, I'd question the presenter and the company that paid for me to go. There is no reason that your average person needs to know HTML or CSS, as those should be handed over to DESIGNERS, people skilled with making things look good. If you want to see what it looks like when everyday people do design just go over to MySpace (akkkk).

Your post really only applies to static html, which is not what most seminars are geared towards. If you're doing anything dynamic with a page, then doing the HTML and CSS by hand is almost always the best option. Using any WYSIWYG editor is going to give you shitty html that's nearly impossible to edit after the fact, and very few are able to work around code. I've had php CMSs that stripped out all the php and javascript in the files when it saved them, so customers or dumbass designers would use the CMS to change the design on a dynamic page and suddenly it's not dynamic anymore.

The people implementing a CMS site need to know (X)HTML, CSS, etc. very well. The Java developers I've known (who implement the back-ends of the big CMSes) don't know HTML, CSS, et. al. any better than the apparent moron who presented this seminar.

If there were a good seminar available that would help the Java guys pick up good HTML skills, the real problem would then be convincing them that it's a real, core developer skill (vs. "just for designers").

When communicating with other people, what words mean *to you* doesn't count for much. In the context of web content, static means unchanging _from the server's point of view_. Whether the client thinks the content changes or not doesn't matter. Flash is (usually) static content, for example.

WebGUI has some support for dynamic content, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know how much (I'm thinking of the thing where it takes a SQL query and turns it into a table or whatever). But what the guy you were talking to meant, is that if you put a PHP script into the WebGUI edit box and save it, it just spits the PHP back when you request the page (static content) instead of *executing* it (dynamic content).

I'm actually dealing with some pages right now where the content needs to be dynamically generated, but the original author wanted it integrated with WebGUI. So what does he do? He writes a ColdFusion.cfc which responds to AJAX requests, and he loads all of the dynamic data as JSON during onLoad, and then he uses DOM manipulation to add the information to the page. What a MESS!! All because he used a CMS for something it's not meant.

While not exactly a workshop per se, it was the biggest waste of time. My employer basically paid for me to have people try to sell me stuff. Aren't the sales people supposed to be paying me for my time in the form of free lunches, dinners, blow and strippers?

I did attend a USENIX tutorial that was bad. Well maybe not bad in the grand scheme of things, and I liked the presenter, it sucks to have to slam him for this... however...

It was, if I rememeber right, "Advanced perl CGI scripting", or the moral equivalent thereof. The point was... CGI, PERL, and Advanced.

It began with a 3 minute speech about how thats what the tutorial used to be, but people kept signing up who barely, if at all, understood perl, and didn't know jack about CGI... so the tutorial had been severely dumbed down.

After the morning session it became clear that I was going to learn nothing, and so I took the afternoon to find some better way to waste my time, since my employer wasn't getting any value out of sending me to that tutorial in any case, may as well get some value out of the time.

Again, was too bad, it looked like it could have been cool, and the presenter certainly knew his stuff and could have given a better course. Its just well... lets just say, it looked like I was among the minority who left.

Got similar from the "Intro to C++" professor I had. "I'm now showing you an array, which the school doesn't want me to teach," he said. When queried why, it turns out that the morons that the "guidance counselors indicated had high computer aptitude" couldn't wrap their heads around a basic, simple array. We had OUR education dumbed down 'cause of some kid that shouldn't have been in the class to begin with.

Oh you're telling me. In Ontario, Canada about 4 years ago we were using PII-400s with 4GB hard drives and 64MB of RAM to install Windows NT Server 4 as part of our Advanced Operating Systems course component. Suffice to say it took all class to format/install the OS. Then the instructor informs us that the next class's itinerary included formatting and re-installing NT so we could become more familiar with the installation routine.

A few of us who were expecting to delve into Linux, Windows XP, domains, etc. at the time asked if we could divert and do some other activities or atleast explore the NT server we'd already installed and he told us no, he couldn't set up individual lesson plans for select groups so we'd have to follow with the rest of the class. So we all developed mysterious illnesses the next day.

This class was an advanced component covering operating systems in an industry grade (and "industry developed") three year program and it listed no pre-requisites. Some of the people in our course couldn't even type letalone operate a modern PC - forget servers, switches, routers or the like - a word processor was fascinating and the rest of us had to suffer for it.

Our Telephony course had a mid-term required 30 page (double spaced) report due on the history, present, and future of telephony (one could easily write 300 pages but I digress). So here I am busting my hump, dissapointed in myself for only managing 26 or 27 pages, which I hole punch and hand in in a nicely coloured duo-tang on the prescribed day and what do I see from my classmates? 2, 3 and 4 page reports with a staple at the top corner, pictures galore (lots of photos of Alexander Bell, pictures of old telephones, new telephones) and due to the overwhelming complaints of the students the teacher had to give these people 'A' grades. So 4 pages double spaced with extra wide margins and 25% images with huge headers printed with 30 point font get an 'A' which completely invalidated my 27 page hand-in.

n.b. Our final exam in that class was open book in absurdia. Anything you could bring in on paper was allowed. If you could wheel a filing cabinet into the exam room it was permitted. The failure rate was more than 60% until the students whined.

back in the Tivoli days I got sent to a 2-day class on how to use it. It was about totally worthless.

I found out the next week that the class had cost $750, and I actually went into the CEO's office and suggested to him that next time they want me to know something, they pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book. He wasn't especially amused.

You are of course correct, but if you speak with some business people you will be surprised why some businesses (and even individuals) take courses and enroll their staff to workshops and training sessions. Sometimes training is done not in order to actually learn something, but only because of various external requirements (eg legal, or requirements imposed or recommended by professional bodies), obscure accounting motives, publicity or advertising reasons ("we spent a million in staff training last year!"), hierarchical or careerist reasons ("manager: I will enroll my staff in extensive training so that my boss can't use their lack of skills as an excuse to fire me for hiring incompetent employees" or even "I, as the training manager, must make everyone attend training sessions because it's good for making me more important within the company"), or sometimes even irrational psychological reasons ("if we lose, it won't be because we didn't try hard but because out training was useless, so it's the trainer's problem not ours"). Yea I know all this is completely anti-productive and irrational, but I have actually seen all this being done in dysfunctional companies (sometimes even required by external agencies or bodies).

I've GIVEN some great, and somewhat bad talks in my day - every good speaker will tell you the same thing.
Most of the bad talks were situations where I was asked to sub for someone - or an area where I "WANTED" to be an expert - but really wasn't.
Many times, after a talk, I find that something I said was just plain wrong - it happens - to everyone - even the best speakers out there.
They key is, as an attendee, to not sit around and waste time listening to a bad speaker. I just quietly walk out, picking up an evaluation form in the process, and making sure the instructor gets my feedback.
As an occasional bad speaker - the best thing an audience member can do for me is to let me know if I have gotten it wrong!
In the end, the only way tp turn a bad speaker into a good one - is through feedback - even if it is "YOU SUCK!"

In University, in a web design class. The teacher was demonstrating coding a page. As he was entring links into URLs, I start spelling "P-L-A-Y-B-O-Y-.-C-O-M", which the teacher dutifully typed. When he realized what he wrote, he backspaced over "BOY" and typed "GIRL", then went on with his demonstration.

5 minutes later, by accident, he clicks on the link, triggering a cascade of pop-ups with naked men in front of the class, which was laughing it's lungs out...

funny you should mention playgirl... They were an early "pioneer" in name based virtual hosting...A friend of mine left the company but left his vanity domain on our DNS server.So i resolve www.playboy.com and place the resulting IP address in my friends www entry for his domain.I verify the DNS is resolving to the correct address and never bother to see if my prank works.Well, turns out instead of the relatively mild and innocent playgirl page, which was only about as shocking as a cosmo magazine front cov

I remember watching UC Berkeley's webcast of their intro to computing class, CS61A. (i think it was fall of '02). Anyways, one of the assignments they did was an english to pig latin translator in scheme.

He typed:
'(cs61a is a great class)

and got (something like):
(acs61ay isay aay eatgray assclay)

the class was laughing their ass off for a few minutes befure the prof. looked at his laptop and realized what exactly happened.

So this total propeller head who's teaching the class says "Perl is the easiest language to learn - very natural and logical syntax"...... I lasted until the morning break - then went back ot my office to get some work done.....

Actually, there was some merit in his reply.On many architectures the jump from 32 to 64 bits simply gives you access to more memory and lets you do 64-bit math somewhat faster. The downside is that all your pointers and variables of type "long" are now twice as long, which means that the app consumes more memory, more cache, more bandwidth, etc. This is why the standard mode of operation on a ppc64 machine is to have a 64-bit kernel with a userspace that is mostly 32-bit.

I felt bad for the presenter of a two day course on SOA. No one told him that our business model revolves around building totally custom solutions that are rarely, if ever, allowed to talk to the open 'net. I finally explained this to him and he looked crestfallen. He asked the class (of engineers) and everyone agreed that we couldn't use any of it. A waste of time for all involved, costing many thousands of dollars.

I went to this PLC (Programmable Logic Controller, that's industrial control for you computer geeks). It started OK, with some drone showing off Schneider Electric's new Contactor (the TeSys U, a "smart" contactor with a LCD display, over/under load protection, short-circuit protection,.. whatever). Later on comes this guy, making some really bad jokes and then laughing himself -- the rest of us just laughed at the way he laughed, he was really loud. So, he shows some PLC basics. All was fine...

Next day he said, well, we're finished with the PLC stuff (actually we were finished with some really really bird's eye view of Ladder diagrams), now we'll see some SCADA. So the guy start showing this REALLY CRAPPY 16-bit app, and he showed ONE BY ONE every single widget (buttons, bar graphs, even some motors that changed colors to show when the output was running). And the library was H U G E. THOUSANDS of widgets. And he showed them "oh, look at how many of them there are! Just see how flexible this program is! See! We even have traffic lights! Buttons! Little trucks, big trucks, cars...".

I went outside and came back in 1 hour, and the guy was STILL SHOWING the fucking widgets and how to place and connect them. Needless to say, I didn't stay.

The university for which I worked promised an "advanced" email workshop. Thinking that I might learn something halfway interesting or useful about the filing system or filtering or whatever, I signed up. After all, I act as my department's tech rep and have to keep up on things in order to counsel my colleagues!

So I waltz into the computer labs one sunny August afternoon, ready for my "advanced" workshop fun. And what awaited me was the most painful IT experience of my life as the instructor walked us through the "advanced" complexities of logging in, clicking on subjects to read messages, clicking on buttons to reply or delete. We didn't even get to Reply All, CC or BCC, let alone folder, filters or the rest of the software options I'd expected them to cover.

I asked why this was considered to be at an advanced level. The woman running the workshop said that this was as much as anyone needed to know about the system, really. That's when I tuned out and starting making some ASCII art to pass the time.

Once I had a job at a Very Large Telecom Corporation and as a requirement of getting an email account, I was required to attend an e-mail orientation session, which consisted of a PowerPoint talk given by someone in the IT/Email dept. The speaker trumpeted the fact that prior to the procurement of their latest email system, each email had cost the company $1000 to deliver. The new system was much more economical--I don't recall the figure now.

The lecturer claimed he'd previous been working in the industry developing embedded C code. After 15 minutes of him explaining that # directives are evaluated at runtime, I couldn't take it. I put my hand up and simply said "you're wrong. That's what the precompiler does". I had a reputation for knowing what I was on about (I was there for a qualification, not because I didn't know C). He went beetroot red. In hindsight I should have talked to him after the class and had him correct his mistake the next week, but hey I was a cocky 18 year old, and he was talking BS. He was a nice guy and was genuinely trying to be helpful. He just wasn't very good.

I once had an instructor at an introductory level programming class (which I was required to take and they refused to let me test out of) try to insist that in C and C++ the int in the line:
int main()
stands for initialize. No amount of arguing with the instructor could convince him that it was declaring the return type of the main function as an integer. As it happens the instructor was also head of the computer science department. I spent the rest of that semester teaching the entire class after the instructor left because I felt bad for them. They all agreed I did a much better job than the instructor. I would have gotten a job as a teacher there, but they couldn't afford my rate.

once had an instructor at an introductory level programming class (which I was required to take and they refused to let me test out of) try to insist that in C and C++ the int in the line:
int main()
stands for initialize.

My daughter took a course on C++ at the local community college. The last assignment required building a program that would run as a cgi on a Linux-based webserver. Prior to this point, everything had been Windows based. The instructor claimed in his notes on the assignment that the C+

A teacher does not by definition know everything; very often, teachers are wrong about stuff, too.

A teacher who can stand being corrected is nearly a treasure to be cherished these days.
Some of the teachers I've had have been patently wrong on come counts, blatantly unknowledgeable on others, yet would not accept any kind of correction, criticism or comment.

I got my revenge by getting a high grade and writing a poor evaluation.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...

Well, one thing that was correct in the article: tables are still the best way to organise a html page. At least for relatively complex websites. There is absolutely no replacement for tables, when it comes to aligning elements to each other, both horizontally and vertically.

CSS just doesn't cut it for relative positioning to multiple elements in a column. For simple layouts, CSS is great. It works, it looks neat, and is very maintainable. But as soon as you start needing a proper grid style layout, it just

Could you provide us with an example of a website that is too hard to do in CSS? I think that would argue your case more than "yes it IS still needed."I think people here assume you are cutting complex (non-rectangular) pics in pieces and putting them in td cells. This would be a bad way of implementing a layout, since it's easily placed in a div in its entirety, then positioned anywhere on the page. I assume you're aware of this though, and am interested in seeing a use of tables (outside of tabular data)